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Dark themes are becoming more and more popular. On some devices, they can even save battery power. It all depends on what type of display your device have—only devices with OLED displays can reap the power-saving benefits.

Devices With OLED Displays Only

You’ve probably heard of OLED displays, especially if you’ve been on the market for a new TV in the last year or so. OLED screens differ from LCD and LED displays typically found in electronics in that OLEDs don’t have a backlight layer: each pixel is individually illuminated. This makes the display thinner, but the main draw is that black pixels don’t get lit up at all.

The result is higher contrast in your favorite films, inky blacks throughout any interface, and battery savings when you’re using a dark theme on your laptop or cell phone.

When a Dark Theme Can Save Battery Power on Your Laptop

OLED laptops are starting to appear, with some newer models just announced at CES 2019. There haven’t been any macOS or ChromeOS laptops with OLED screens, but there are a few Windows options. HP’s Spectre x360 15 is shipping with a 15-inch Samsung AMOLED display, while Lenovo is offering its Yoga C730 with an OLED panel. Surface fans will be out of luck—Microsoft hasn’t shipped an OLED screen on its laptops yet.

You won’t get the battery savings benefits if your laptop isn’t using an OLED display, and you could find the dark theme may harm your battery life—in theory, at least. A dark theme could lead you to crank your laptop’s brightness to read text and see buttons in the interface, and the higher brightness would draw more power from the battery. This will depend on how much light is in your environment, how well your eyesight works, and how efficient the backlight is—so you may not notice any difference. Just keep that in mind when you’re switching to the dark side.

When a Dark Theme Can Save Battery Power on Your Cell Phone

Good morning! A bunch of stuff happened this morning, with Apple quietly announcing new AirPods, Google’s solution for its EU Android woes, some interesting takes on Google Stadia, and more. Here’s your morning briefing for March 20th, 2019.

Apple News

Apple has been on a slow roll of announcing devices updates every day this week, and today is no different—new AirPods are here!

The second generation AirPods have a wireless charging case, better battery life, and support for Hey Siri. That’s pretty much what everyone wanted, right? [Review Geek]

Google and Android News

The big news here is actually from yesterday: Google Stadia. Here’s a roundup of related information and interesting takes regarding this new game streaming platform. Oh, there’s some non-Stadia stuff in here too.

Shadow wants to sell you a dream: a super-powerful, always-connected computer that you can access from anywhere and with any device. That computer is meant primarily for gaming, but since it’s running Windows, it can also do anything a normal PC can do.

And at a basic level, Shadow does that. The service works, and the experience is surprisingly good… so long as you’re accessing it from another computer. Move to a phone, a tablet, or even Shadow’s first-party Ghost hardware, and things fall apart quickly. That doesn’t mean that Shadow isn’t worth investigating, but it does mean that its appeal is limited to a very specific audience—and that a large portion of that audience probably already has access to a gaming PC.

Shadow is cool. But it isn’t living up to its potential, and for lot of users that’s going to mean it isn’t worth a fairly hefty $35 a month to access it.

What You Get with Shadow

So, a quick rundown of what Shadow is: it’s a platform that allows you to “rent” a high-end Windows machine, virtualized on Shadow’s servers, and accessed remotely from your Windows/MacOS/Linux PC, Android device, or the Shadow Ghost set-top box. The remote machine is fine-tuned to play PC games, with a powerful and dedicated NVIDIA GPU, a super-fast web connection at Shadow’s data center, all streaming to you at up to 1440p (or 1080p for 144 Hz speed).

That’s a neat trick. It’s nothing you can’t do with your own home PC and a remote access program—indeed, there are already services like NVIDIA GameStream and Steam In-Home Streaming that do pretty much the same thing. The advantage of the Shadow setup is that it’s in the cloud and accessible from anywhere with a fast data connection, and it’s also managed remotely for optimum stability and speed.

If you want a high-end gaming PC without having to build it or buy it, or even store it in your home and pay the extra electricity to run the thing, this is a good way to achieve your goal. That’s assuming that, one, you have a fast enough connection to make the streaming interface worth it (25 Mbps at least), and you’re willing to pay the $35 a month to access the service.

A few other technical details. There’s basically no limit on the virtualized Windows machine, and you can install any software you like. Though you can’t change the hardware, it’s fairly generous in terms of specs. Your remote machine’s processor is an Intel Xeon E5-2678, with 12 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 1080 equivalent GPU (one of the fastest around, though recently superseded by the new RTX models). The virtual storage is a bit tight at just 256GB, but it’s fast, and the data center’s connection is so speedy (700-800 Mbps when I tested it) that you can download even the largest games with almost no delay.

…and What You Don’t

Unlike more high-profile game streaming services from NVIDIA and Sony PlayStation, you don’t actually get any games to go on your Shadow machine. It comes pre-installed with game store clients like Steam, Origin, and Uplay, and it’s compatible with anything that runs on Windows, up to and including the newest titles. But you’ll have to provide those titles yourself, downloading and installing them manually. This is an advantage if you already have a huge library of PC games, but if not, you’ll be searching for some free stuff like Apex Legends.

Another thing that Shadow doesn’t provide is a game management interface. The connection works more or less the same as any remote computer access system: log into Shadow’s service, and you’re presented with a standard Windows 10 desktop in either fullscreen or windowed mode. Switching between those two is easy, but actually managing your Shadow computer is more or less impossible without a mouse and keyboard ready to go.